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Hello and welcome to The Show Must Go On blog! We’re going to use this to keep track of news, reviews, updates, competitions, and more, but to get us started I thought I’d tell you a bit about how the game came to be.

I’m Alex Fleetwood, founder and director of Hide&Seek, a game design studio dedicated to inventing new kinds of play. We were invited by the Royal Opera House to come in and explore the potential of games as a way to extend their content, reputation and talent to new audiences. iOS devices – iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches – have have won the hearts of millions of gamers in recent years. And for us, the fact that the cost to develop games is relatively low was very important. So a decision was taken – to take the work of an organisation known for putting on amazing performances of operas and ballets onto a platform where the most popular game is Angry Birds…

To to meet that challenge, we headed to Covent Garden and talked to everyone we could, from the creative director to the wonderful lady who produces the surtitles above the stage. We spent a lot of time backstage, hanging out in different departments, witnessing the amazing craft and attention to detail that goes into every element of the production.

All of which led us to the conclusion that rather than make a game about the people on the stage, we should make one about the people behind it. That we should celebrate the titanic efforts that go into a perfect show. That we could play on the jeopardy, pressure and excitement of the clock ticking toward curtain up. We think that this energy – this manic magic – is what unites iPhone gamers and the Royal Opera House. It’s celebrated in plays like Noises Off, movies like Babes in Arms and Moulin Rouge, TV shows like Glee.

We hope we’ve captured a bit of that feeling in our game, and we really hope that you’ll enjoy playing it.

To celebrate the launch of The Show Must Go On, our friends at the Royal Opera House and EMI Classics have put their heads together to create a Show VIP Package Prize. The winner will receive two tickets to an end-of-year show at The Royal Opera House, a backstage VIP tour and ‘A Festival of Ballet’ collection of 50 CDs from EMI Classics, featuring music from Swan Lake and The Nutcracker.

The competition will take place on Twitter – you’ll find us @showgametweets. All we ask is that you send us your crazy tales of your show experiences. Whether it’s that time you had to deliver dentures to Someone Quite Famous’ dressing room during a work experience stint or the evening you watched Peter Pan fly into the audience and hover there while stage crew scrambled to keep the show on track- we want to hear them! The best #showtales will be collated and we’ll be very picky about our winner… the biggest challenge of all? Making us laugh with an anecdote of just 140 characters.